Sunday, February 27, 2011

1981 - Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends (revisited)

Wizard Magazine #234 featured some interviews with the cast and creative teams and wanted to share some highlights.

- The show was originally called “The Spider-Friends”, but of course that was a little too close to The Super-Friends. As mentioned in my previous article, the show was originally going to feature the Human Torch. Although, no reasons were given for why the change to Firestar.

- Artist Rich Hoberg shared my rather low opinion of Ms. Lion: “Having Ms. Lion on the show killed me. I hated her, but I know some people like her. She was extraneous comic relief, when comic relief should be built into the characters.

- Rich Hoberg based his Firestorm/Angelica Jones on John Romita’s Mary Jane Watson. And that caused me to do a bit more digging and turned up this wonderful pre-production art. Apparently, there were many names floating around for Firestar, like Heatwave, Starblaze, and Firefly.

Also found these great looking scans of preliminary cells.

And last, but not least, discovered that there were a few newspaper insert comics featuring Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends.

11 comments:

oh man this show used to be the highlight of my weekend when i was a kid. that was back when there was such a thing as saturday morning cartoons. but now unfortunately when i watch this it doesn't quite hold up.

Best cartoon EVER! But the new Avengers cartoon is a close 2nd. Still, Spidey and Friends has the most sentimental value for me. Firestar was HOT, pun intended, and I think I still have a thing for red-heads because of this show. I liked the voice, and definitely one of the greatest costumes ever----I almost puked when they changed it in Avengers. George Perez, I love you, man, but the new costume SUCKS!

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